Flaw Salad

As she sang along to songs and remembered the people she used to sing them with, she realized for the first time that he was relatively inexperienced in endings. Her moving on was always done with the faith that someone new would arrive, or she would find him, and the gaps would be filled. She would sing again with another, another, another. His fear was not borne of youthful insecurity, but rather stability, for he had stood so long in the same place, waiting to grab what life could bring him, what little happened to pass by, that he never learned to venture out, to seek, to let go and know he could turn on his heels and find something new. She floated by him one day, and he gripped her tightly, and his desperation, the whiteness of his knuckles as he fought against release, frightened her. Someday soon, she would have to break free.